I have easily paired my Sony SBH-20 headset with my Toshiba Portege notebook using Gnome Bluetooth on my debian 8.3 stable (debian jessie) system.
However connection could not be established that easily.
Whenever I turned the connection switch on in Gnome-Bluetooth it was instantly becoming off. The swiftness of this reaction made me think that there was something basically wrong with my Bluetooth configuration.
I have solved this problem basically following the Arch Wiki about Bluetooth Headset with a little adaptation for debian.
Firstly I installed pulseaudio-module-bluetooth package:
# apt-get install pulseaudio-module-bluetooth
Secondly, I restarted pulseaudio:
killall pulseaudio pulseaudio --check pulseaudio
At this point it could probably work directly using Gnome-Bluetooth, but I used following commands:
sudo systemctl start bluetooth bluetoothctl
Now in its own prompt:
power on
agent on
default-agent
connect {mac address of my already paired headset}
My Bluetooth headset connected successfully. Since then I have not experienced any problem with using Gnome-Bluetooth while turning my Bluetooth headset connection on and off.
From defending clients to defending code. Developing software professionally in the U.S., offering legal advice on the side, and gaming like it’s still the ’90s. LLM Exeter, PhD(c) in Private Int’l Law. Defender of Kaer Morhen.